"Behold... his MIGHTY HAND-HELD!"
- Chuck Heston a la Moses a la The Ten Commandments, using the Sega
Exodus (along with the Power of God) to part the Red Sea. (This is one
of those "cut" scenes from the movies, yeah)

Well I guess it started a few
months ago when someone emailed me RE: a
"Genesis-in-a-controller" thing being released. Unlike some of
the stuff you see (ie:, the NES-in-a-controller) the Sega one is legit
and licensed to a company called Radica, whom I also believe were
involved with making the small Revision 3 Genesis from the late 90's
(that nobody has hardly ever seen)

Ordering one online was a
whopping $35 so I was a little hesitant (although it's obviously
perfectly OK for me to rip apart brand-new PS2's). However one day in
line at Best Buy I saw some of the Radica Genesis's for only $25! I
immediately bought one.

And upon getting home
immediately ripped it apart. There's a small little fakey
"Genesis", measuring about 3" x 2.5" x 1.5" and
a controller. Inside the fakey Genesis is a small circuit board
containing a mini "Genesis-On-A-Chip" (GOAC) and a ROM chip.
This ROM chip contains the 6 built-in games. By desoldering it and
deducing the pinouts I was able to attach a real live cartridge
connector to the thing and make a regular functioning Genesis. (There's
a photo of this on the main news page)

For some reason I couldn't
use the IC from a regular Genesis controller (didn't work when I tried
it) so I just carved out the IC glop-top from inside the Radica
controller and used to make the built-in controller for my Exodus, as
seen above.

Next I designed a case using
Adobe Illustrator. It has 3 main parts, the front (holds the screen and
controls), the middle match plate and the back (holds the batteries,
Genesis board and cartridge slot. The screen is a Casio EV-680, which is
the same as a RCA or Cinevision 3" TFT screen from Radioshack
(They've all got the same guts)

Here's the front of the unit
a little closer-up. As you can see, only about 10 wires go from the back
of the unit to the front. It's a fairly simple system, aside from all
the minute wiring on the Genesis board itself.

The back of the thing with
the battery cover off. As with the NOAC NES portable I made, this takes
only 4 AA's and only draws about 360mA total. This is due in fact to the
Genesis part only drawing 60mA and the TV using a white LED mod (instead
of the bulb it came with)

Exodus from the side. The
total size of the unit is 7.5" x 4.5" x 1.5" thick.

Alright, as you may or may
not know Sega actually made a portable Genesis back in 1995 called the
Nomad. But I figured this one might be better in a few ways:

Uses less batteries (4 VS
6) and gets as much or more play time out of them.

Weighs less (because of
less batteries)

Looks like a Genesis

Portrait-style (For some
reason I prefer it to landscape)

TFT active matrix
(non-blurry) display. Helps with games like Sonic.

So remember the morale of
this story: the Radica Genesis 6-in-1 gamepad thing can be made into
more than it seems...